Sip water from a firehose

It seems like in most library blogs and journals, people comment on the misperception that libraries are not necessary because people can google everything. Everything is on the internet. The internet is like a huge library but all the books are on the floor. The catch is that not all the information is of high quality and anyone can put anything on the internet. Wikipedia is not a good source of accurate information. Wikipedia may be good as a starting point for a serious search for information, but it is not good for serious research on anything. It may be good to search the sources that the Wikipedia author used, but the sources may not be more accurate. Google will come up with thousands of hits for anything, but most users only look at the first ten hits. Searches need precision. Trying to get a specific piece of information in the world of i-pods, podcasts, blackberries (more like crackberries) and constant advertising is like trying to get a sip of water from a fire hose. A few people have the skills to make searches that are precise enough to get that sip of water. Lexis Nexis is good for getting legal research. Before Lexis Nexis, legal researchers had to look at one book for cases in one area of law, then get another book for the cases in that jurisdiction, then get another book for the codes, then get another book to look at codes in another area. With Lexis Nexis, people can look for legal code in a selected list of sources, they can select the areas of law and the local jurisdiction and the cases that are relevant. Medical research is similar with NLM Gateway, Medline, Clinical Trials, ToxNet, and PubMed. Searches can be very precise for anyone with the right skills. The correct information is there, but it buried under mounds of useless information that people are flooded with every minute.